So, I've been getting mood swings lately and it's been driving me nuts. I've been wondering if my depression is coming back. I've been irritable, I have days where I have no drive to do anything, and I have found inexplicable reasons to be grumpy about anything and everything. I also have weeks where I am inexplicably positive and happy and the whole world is beautiful, and I can feel my mood changing between Dark and Bright, and I have no control over it and I don't like that feeling. It's creepy. Plus, due to my birth control my periods are not on-schedule at all, so I can't track that cycle with any reliability, and thus never know why my brain is stubbornly happy or frustrated that particular week.

So last night, I'm sitting there in a funk and realising that I've been irritated at Chris for little things all week and I haven't said anything about it because I don't trust myself to be irritable for a rational reason. Because, you know how there are those stupid guys who assume that every time a woman is upset it's because she has PMS and she just needs to shut up and eat some chocolate/salt because women don't have legitimate concerns, they just have mood swings? Yeah, that guy is in my head. I can't tell if I'm upset because there are legitimate things to be irritated about or if I'm just Little Miss Hormonal. I can't tell if I'm going into depression again or if it's That Time of the Month.

So, Chris and I were talking last night about how I was feeling, and I was frustrated and absolutely not wanting to go out and be social, and he was getting concerned about me and saying that if this keeps up, he wants me to go to the doctor and make sure that everything is okay. But this morning, menstruation. So of course, everything is fine, because it's normal to feel like a trainwreck once a month.

Because being a girl can feel exactly like that, every stupid month. It can feel like you're going crazy, like you're off your meds, like you're sinking into a black cloud that you're not going to pull out of. And I can't help but suspect that if male biology worked like this, there would be a solution for it already, and it wouldn't be relegated to the somewhat sketchy "herbal" section of the health food stores.

I get to spend the next few months watching my stress level, considering switching birth control, and thinking about whether or not this is "just" hormones or actual depression. Fun, eh?